Giving Compass' Take:

• A new report from EdBuild, an education funding nonprofit, reveals that school district secession is becoming increasingly popular.

• How are local communities addressing this issue? Can donors help?

• Read about the impact of school secessions on racial segregation. 

One night in 2017, Leslie Williams saw a post on Facebook about a meeting later that evening at Gardendale City Hall. Gardendale, a predominately white city in Alabama, had put forward a proposal to split from the Jefferson County School District, which enrolls a student body that is majority black and Latino. If Gardendale’s plan were successful, Williams — who’d graduated from Gardendale High School and always dreamed of sending her three kids there — would instead be forced to enroll them in lower-performing schools farther from her home.

She stood in front of the packed hearing room that night and decided to turn her back on the school board members up at the dais and speak directly to fellow parents. “The options they’ve given us are schools that are already overcrowded,” she said. “Like you, I just want my children to have the best.”

Two years ago, The Hechinger Report and The Nation published an investigation of Gardendale’s efforts to secede from Jefferson County to form a whiter, wealthier school district that excluded diverse neighborhoods like the one where Williams lived. Now, a new report from EdBuild, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable school funding, shows just how common school secession efforts have become.

Between 2000 and 2016, 63 communities split off from their existing school districts to form new ones. In just the last two years, 11 more communities have followed. Most of the new districts are more affluent, and less racially diverse, than those they left behind. Another 16 communities are actively exploring efforts to form their own school districts, according to the report.

This form of educational gerrymandering has proven to be a winning strategy to concentrate property tax dollars and hoard educational opportunities. And it leaves those districts that have been abandoned with fewer dollars to serve an even needier student body.

Read the full article about school district secession by Emmanuel Felton at The Hechinger Report.